24 Marxism after Marx Party's official ideology at the first Congress after the repeal of the anti- socialist law, held in 1891 at Erfurt. Prefiguring the future split in the Party's approach, the Erfurt Programme was divided into two very differ ent halves: one on theory, for which Kautsky was responsible, and one on practice drawn up by Bernstein. The first half reiterated the traditional doctrines of the drive to monopoly, the decline of the middle class, the mpoverishment of the proletariat and the inevitability of the socialis tion of the means of production in a classless society; the second half contained such immediate demands as universal suffrage, freedom of expression, free schooling and a progressive income tax. But no sooner has this rather simplified version of Marxism triumphed in the SPD than the suggestion was made that it needed to be revised. As otto bauer said: The revisionist theory is nothing but the counterpart of vulgar marxism, the necessary impoverishment of the doctrine of Marx during its first penetration into larger and larger sections that are not yet prepared for it. 8 The leading proponent of this revisionism was Edward Bernstein Bernstein, the son of a Berlin railway engineer, had joined the party in 1872 and soon became one of its leading journalists. The anti-socialist law compelled him to emigrate to England in order to be able to con tinue his activities. Bernstein's stay in England was decisive for his view of Marxism. Although Bernstein himself maintained that the idea of his being influenced by the fabians was'completely mistaken, o almost all the leaders of the SPD, including Engels and Bebel, thought it self- evident that, to quote Rosa Luxemburg, 'Bernstein has constructed his theory upon relationships obtaining in England. He sees the world through English spectacles'; and this was a view shared by the Fabians themselves. Bernstein was naturally critical of many Fabian doctrines when he first moved to England, but during the 1890s his views moved very close to th Bernstein was plainly evolving towards some sort of revisionism in the years 1891-3 but it was not until Engels's death that the controversy really broke out. In 1895 Bernstein wrote an article on the 1849 revolu- tion in France. Socialists of the time were accustomed to comment on and situate themselves in regard to, the 1848 revolution in much the same way as contemporary Marxists do with the 1917 revolution Bernstein took a view that was almost diametrically opposed to Marx's view in The Class Struggles in France: for Bernstein, the June days were unnecessary adventurism and he preferred Louis Blanc to Blanqui; and this contrast contained lessons for 1895. These lessons Bernstein worked on systematically in a series of articles entitled Probleme des Sozialismus (Problems of Socialism) published between 1896 and 1898 in Die Neue
Zeit. These articles were later expanded into Bernsteins most important book, published in 1899 under the cumbersome title die voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die aufgabe der Sozialdemokratie(The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy). Of course, the SPD had had its reformist tendencies, articulated by such writers as Vollmar and David, well before Bernstein began to work out his ideas: what aroused opposition in the SPD's intellectual leadership was the fact that Bernstein,'s revisionism was self-proclaimed, systematic and fundamental at least in intention. 12Bernstein was also seen( together with Kautsky)as the heir of Marx and Engels -the person on whom fell the duty of safe- guarding the tradition. (He was, together with Bebel, Engels's executor It is therefore surprising how slow was the reaction to Bernstein's novel views. Kautsky felt a personal loyalty to Bernstein and did not openly criticise him until the summer of 1898. Indeed, Kautsky agreed that some form of revision was necessary and even encouraged Bernstein to supply it: You have overthrown our tactics, our theory of value, our phi losophy: now all depends on what is the new that you are thinking of putting in place of the old. 3 It was only when it became clear how rad ical Bernsteins intentions really were that opposition began to harden There was also the fact that, in spite of his desire to systematise, Bernstein was essentially an eclectic thinker. 'We were all more or less socialist eclectics', wrote Bernstein in 1895 and this applied to him more than most 'Systematic thought and logical progression sat heavily upon me', s he wrote, and this made it difficult to get a coherent picture of his ideas Before examining these views in detail, it is important to give a brief account of the socio-political context in which the revisionist contro- versy was fought out. The title of Bernstein's book is important, for he conceived himself to be reformulating the theoretical presuppositions of the SPD and bringing it into line with its already reformulated practice. In his view, the SPd's tactics were more or less reformist-and here he thought he could call for support on Engels's 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles in france-and his task was to harmonise the theory with this reformism in practice. As the Spd grew ever larger, the administrative and bureaucratic elements grew in importance until at last they became the decisive factor. Although the membership remained surprisingly proletarian, the deputies(who were mainly lawyers and journalists)were well to the right of the activists, the more conservative country districts were over-represented, and-most importantly-the enormous effort put into the highly successful vote-gathering machine inevitably deflected the party from more revolutionary objectives. The trade unions played no direct part in the revisionist controversy -they had little time f
26 Marxism after marx theory of any sort- but they undoubtedly sympathised with the gradu alism of the revisionists. From this point of view, the SpD was never a very Marxist' party and the theoretical disputes tended to be confined to its leading intellectuals Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that Bernsteins views gained fairly widespread support. Their main opponent was Karl Kautsk born in Prague in 1854, he had known Marx and- together with Bernstein- was widely regarded as the direct successor'to Marx and Engels. With the defection of Bernstein, it was up to Kautsky to defend Marxist orthodoxy. Referred to half-ironically as'the Pope of Marxism Kautsky was the most influential socialist thinker during the two decades prior to 1914- Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all sat at his feet As editor of Die Neue Zeit, the party's theoretical monthly, for over thirty years, he occupied a central and predominant role among all Marxist intellectuals. In spite of their evident disagreements, Kautsky's world view had many similarities with that of Bernstein and it makes sense to compare and contrast their respective positions before going on sepa- rately to discuss the radicals- and in particular Rosa Luxemburg Perhaps the most fundamental of Marx's doctrines that Bernstein wished to revise was his theory of value From Fabians such as Shaw and Webb Bernstein had learnt a lot about the marginalist doctrines of Jevons, who wished to equate value with utility and make it dependent on individual desires and the relationship of supply to demand. Bernstein had been dis appointed by Capital Volume Three and this led him to question the whole of Marx's theory of value. The most influential critique of Marx at the time was Zum abschluss des marxschen Systems(Karl Marx and the Close of his System) by the Austrian marginalist Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, who considered that the notion of value had no objective existence(as in Marx)but was simply a quantitative relation between use-values, an abstraction from them. This led Bernstein to view Marx's theory as some kind of abstract hypothesis, and here he was to some extent merely fol lowing Engels. For Bernstein, Marx's theory of value was'a purely abstract concept'1s and the labour theory of value'can claim acceptance only as a speculative formula or a scientific hypothesis. 9 He also considered that this theory could not give an account of the total value of social production and so was inadequate as a starting-point. This led the eclectic Bernstein to attempt a synthesis between Marxian and marginalist concepts of value
The Revisionist Controversy 27 On a less rarified level, Bernstein was a close observer of contemporary trends, and his very lack of interest in systematic theory meant that he was able to perceive some of these trends more clearly than his more Marxist contemporaries. Whether he was able accurately to interpret them is not so 'evident. Thus Bernstein was quick to register the new sense of economic well-being that started in 1895: the last few years of the century saw a rapid rise in real wages and the creation of a 'labour aristocracy' who might have a lot to lose in a revolution. Bernstein saw that the growth of cartels, trusts and monopoly capital were important phenomena, as were the concomitant socialisation of production and the separation of ownership and control. From these factors, together with the increase in credit facilities and enormously improved commu nication and information services, Bernstein concluded that capitalism was gaining in ability to regulate itself. Nor did he draw the corollary that the ownership of capital was being concentrated: on the contrary, he believed (and backed up his views with a barrage of statistics) that prop erty was being diffused by such institutions as joint stock companies, which meant that there were more capitalists than before. Moreover, small and medium-sized firms were not being eliminated but continued to flourish as numerously as ever. And from this there followed political consequences It is thus quite wrong to assume that the present development of soci- ety shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes. Their number increases both relatively and absolutely. If the activity and the prospects of social democracy were dependent on the decrease of the ',, then it might indeed lie down to sleep. But the contrary is the case. The prospects of socialism depend not on the decrease but on the increase of social wealth. 20 So far, therefore, from thinking that crisis was inevitable, Bernstein believed that the existence of trusts, cartels, etc, enabled capitalism to sur- vive almost indefinitely. Indeed he even said that this harmonious devel opment of capitalism could lead through uninterruptedly to socialism Kautsky, on the other hand, considered such ideas to be dangerous illu- sions. In particular, he considered Bernsteins critique of Marx,'s doctrine of concentration to be the key to his revisionism. Contesting the conclu sions that Bernstein drew from his statistics, Kautsky maintained that, although the number of small enterprises was not necessarily less, their economic domain was decreasing as they were often little but the last
28 Marxism after Marx refuge of the lower middle classes on the verge of proletarianisation Kautsky believed that periodic depression would eventually squeeze small businesses out of existence and that, as ever-increasing resources were necessary for reinvestment, only the very wealthiest would be able to sur- vive. Whereas Bernstein regarded cartels, etc, as a means of capitalist self- regulation, for Kautsky they were evidence of the final involution of the system, the end of free competition and the imminence of a collapse Although, in reply to Bernstein s criticisms, Kautsky denied that Marx had had a breakdown' theory, the Erfurt Programme certainly did seem to subscribe to such an idea and Kautsky himself took the view that crises would be ever more serious and that cyclical depressions were inevitable under capitalism. He admitted later(as against Rosa Luxemburg) that domestic consumption could absorb increased production. But in his argument with Bernstein he maintained that an increase in production was inevitable with the further introduction of machinery and that the consumption capacity of the working class would not rise concomitantly, since the system tended to depress wages as far as possible. The resulting surplus produce could not be absorbed by the capitalists, who had to re- invest more and more, and an eventual collapse was inevitable Although the question of imperialism did not enter directly into the revisionist debate, it was clearly linked to Kautsky's underconsumptionist views and also explained why he did not expect capitalism to evolve in a liberal, cooperative direction. Whereas Bernstein was driven on occasion to defending German colonial expansion, the analysis of imperialism was one of Kautsky s chief theoretical innovations in Marxist doctrine. 21. As early as the mid-1880s, Kautsky had connected the annexation of over seas territories with his underconsumptionist views: the home market being insufficient, new markets would have to be found in colonies Later he emphasised the importance for groups outside the industrial capitalists- the military the bureaucracy, and above all, the finance capitalists-of a colonial expansion that enabled not only the export of surplus goods but also the capital to buy them. In his Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik(considered by Bebel to be his best book) he argued that capital was now being exported as an effort to limit productivity and sta- bilise the system. Kautsky also emphasised the imbalance in expansion between the industrial and the agricultural sectors of the world market the slow expansion of the latter being unable fully to supply the market or raw materials for the former. Originally he had held war to be a neces- sary outcome of imperialism. But by 1912, under the influence of a more cooperative international climate, and the appearance of Hilferding's Finanzkapital, 22 Kautsky was asserting that colonies were in the long run